To me it's kind of a weird arbitrary divide to make. All the text editors mentioned offer IDE like functionality at various levels. They help you with variou

To me it's kind of a weird arbitrary divide to make. All the text editors mentioned offer IDE like functionality at various levels. They help you with various kinds of auto-complete, context sensitive help, etc. etc. Where is the line that when crossed makes it an IDE an not an editor? To be fair to the author though, the phrase was "rely on an IDE", not "use an IDE" which is a little different. I think a more valid way to look at it is that great hackers tend to use highly advanced editors and they totally own them from top to bottom - whether they are in an IDE or not. That might just mean that they have a completely customized eclipse setup and know every hotkey extension innately or (like myself) use powerful editor plugins like viPlugin to ratchet up the productivity.